Born in Dublin, Eamon Grennan attended boarding school at a Cistercian monastery, studied at University College, Dublin, and later earned his doctorate at Harvard. The author of 10 poetry collections, he says that his poems try “to marry speech patterns to musical language” and “try to establish a kind of range of commitment to the domestic on the one hand, to the erotic on the other, to the natural world, the simple, observed world, and at the same time stay fairly clear.”
A citation written when he was awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize notes that “Grennan would have us know — no, would have us see, feel, hear, taste and smell — that the world, moment by ordinary or agonizing moment, lies chock-full with its own clarifications and rewards.”
Among his other awards are a PEN Award for poetry in translation (Selected Poems of Giacomo Leopardi), several Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Grennan was the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College until his retirement in 2004.
He divides his time between Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and western Ireland, and his poetry shows the imprint of both lands. On May 27, he will be the first reader in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington.
— Connecticut Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin
Listen
When the one cow eyeing you with its sniper’s spectral gaze
hears louder than the Angelus bell the big bó-bawl
of another cow down near the lake she ups her massy head
wide-opens a cavernous mouth and bawls back
and for a few huge cow-minutes these two antiphonal plainchanters
conduct a world-obliterating duet: a duologue affirming
with each enormous diphthong their earthly unassailable
real presence—their fully inhabited overflowing moment—
and then it’s night and only the small sky-high cry of one
nightbird over lake-glimmer breaks the silence with its
little lamenting whistle-cry repeating and repeating itself
into vacancy and the mute eyelessness of space and there’s nothing
beyond that naked nachtmusik in the dead silent wide-shining fields
of furze and rushes and bramble bushes of ever-thickening black.
Bee Fuchsia
At the first brief lull
In terrible weather
Bees are back, each
Entering headfirst
The upside-down open
Nectar-heavy skirts
Of wet fuchsia flowers
And seeming to stay
Quite still in that laden
Inner space, only
The smallest shudder
Of the two together
When the bee-tongue
Unrolls and runs
Its tiny red carpet
Into the heart
Of what is no mystery
But the very vanishing
Point and live centre
Of the flower’s instant
Irrevocable unfolding,
Then stillness again
While this exchange
(Layer after layer of
Dusty goodness lipped,
Given) is taking place—
The flower flushed
And swelling a little,
The bee gently but
Hungrily clutching.
October Reward
No doubt the gunmetal grackles are stirring
among the sturdy stems of goldenrod
but what I notice after a slow morning simmer
has turned everything its Midas-light touches
into an aspect of dazzle is the single lemon-yellow
butterfly small as a postage stamp
and flying sideways in zigs and zags until it
finds almost buried in grass the one
remaining still-untouched dandelion and lights
and settles into it with its fragile breeze-blown
near-infinite persistence this once rewarded.
Four Deer
Four deer lift up their lovely heads to me
in the dusk of the golf course I plod across
towards home. They’re browsing the wet grass
the snow has left and, statued, stare at me
in deep silence, and I see whatever light there is
gather to glossy pools in their eight mild,
barely curious but wary eyes. When one at a time
they bend again to feed, I can hear the crisp
moist crunch of the surviving grass
between their teeth, imagine the slow lick of a tongue
over whickering lips. They’ve come from the unlit
winter corners of their fright to find
a fresh season, this early gift, and stand
almost easy at the edge of white snow islands and
lap the grey-green sweet depleted grass. About them
hangs an air of such domestic sense, the comfortable
hush of folk at home with one another, a familiar
something I sense in spite of the great gulf of strangeness
we must look over at each other. Tails flicker
white in thickening dusk, and I feel their relief at
the touch of cold snow underfoot while their faces
nuzzle grass, as if, like birds, they had crossed
unspeakable vacant wastes with nothing but hunger
shaping their brains, driving them from leaf to
dry leaf, sour strips of bark, under a thunder of guns
and into the cold comfort of early dark. I’ve seen
their straight despairing lines cloven in snowfields
under storm, an Indian file of famished natives, poor
unprayed-for wanderers through blinding chill, seasoned
castaways in search of home ports, which they’ve found
at last, here on winter’s verge between our houses and
their trees. All of a sudden, I’ve come too close. Moving
as one mind they spring in silent waves
over the grass, then crack snow with sharp hard
snaps, lightfooting it into the sanctuary of a pine grove
where they stand looking back at me, a deer-shaped
family of shadows against the darker arch of trees and
this rusting dusk. When silence settles over us again
and they bow down to browse, the sound of grass being
lipped, bitten, meets me across the space between us. Close
enough for comfort, they see we keep, instinctively,
our distance, sharing this air
where a few last shards of daylight still
glitter in little meltpools or spread a skin
of brightness on the ice, the ice stiffening towards midnight
under the clean magnesium burn of a first star.
Winter City Food Market
Croakers snappers silver trout striped bass
ubricone cranberry-stilton and all forms of meat
on and off the bone plus the pout of one
catwalk wanna-be who’s checking her own
thereness in the glass wall that is the market’s window
make up the city as is and as this homeless
huddle of rags (astride a steam vent on the corner
to keep body-soul together and get from
this hapless today to tomorrow) hopelessly knows it.
Early Morning Jog
And the geese the kingfisher the dove the dead chipmunk
and the one tree turned the saffron of a monk’s sanghati
and the mist scarfed between high pine branches and the big-
boughed London plane tree and the single pink almost
full-blown rose and the shrill choir of starlings rounding the chapel
belfry and the sleek dew-dabbled gleam highlighting three
blue bikes that have leaned all night against the knobbled barks
of pine and maple and walnut and here’s the night shift
starting sleepy-eyed for home and there’s the grey-rimmed halo
risen round the squirrel’s tail and now the sudden illumination
of roof-slates and now your sweat your breath your aching knees.
A Gentle Art
(for my mother)
I’ve been learning how to light a fire
Again, after thirty years. Begin (she’d say)
With a bed of yesterday’s newspapers—
Disasters, weddings, births and deaths,
All that everyday black and white of
History is first to go up in smoke. The sticks
Crosswise, holding in their dry heads
Memories of detonating blossom, leaf. Saved
From the ashes of last night’s fire,
Arrange the cinders among the sticks.
Crown them with coal nuggets, handling
Such antiquity as behooves it,
For out of this darkness, light. Look,
It’s a cold but comely thing
I’ve put together as my mother showed me,
Down to sweeping the fireplace clean. Lit,
You must cover from view, let it concentrate—
Some things being better done in secret.
Pretend another interest, but never
Let it slip your mind: know its breathing,
Its gulps and little gasps, its silence
And satisfied whispers, its lapping air.
At a certain moment you may be sure (she’d say)
It’s caught. Then you simply leave it be:
It’s on its own now, leading its mysterious
Hungry life, becoming more itself by the minute,
Like a child grown up, growing strange.
Intermission
They’re feeding each other, two small birds
Swivelling on a sea-stone, open beaks
Kissing and closing—creatures seeing to
Each other’s needs without question, drawing
The big world into their brief circle
Of wing-quiver, heart-shiver, quick cries
As if the nerves themselves gave tongue,
The path between desire and satisfaction
Shorter than thought, the ground dividing
Being from being—one flesh-protected
Spark of life from another—covered
In no time, so even time, for the moment,
Is a matter of no moment, smoke that’s
Melted into air, into thin air, to leave
But a flaring thing behind: candescent
And burning its brief interval till all is ash,
Redemptive breath recovering itself,
Eyes seeking in eyes an answer
To what’s happened. The fire at the heart
Of things is what these two birds ignite
In their give and take, saying we live
In the one world—where some law
Of loving exchange is, too, what tends the blaze
And can startle us into a kind of intermission
Of peace between two clamorous cliff-
Crumbling waves that rear, break, roar
And rip to shreds a coast of stone, unsettling
The air we stand in with a surf-storm
Of salt-light that bites our eyes, blinding them.
Morning: the Twenty-Second of March
All the green things in the house
on fire with greenness. The trees
in the garden take their naked ease
like Demoiselles d’Avignon.
We came awake
to the spider-plant’s crisp shadow
printing the pillowcase
between us. Limp fingers of steam
curl auspiciously from the cup
of tea I’ve brought you, and a blue-jay
screeched blue murder beyond the door.
In a painting over the bed
five tea-coloured cows stand
hock-deep in water at the broad
bend of a river-small smoothback stones
turtling its near margin. A brace
of leafy branches leans over it
from the far bank, where the sun
spreads an open field like butter,
while the cows bend down
to the dumbfound smudge of their own faces
in the flat, metallic water. And here
this minute at the bristle tip
of the Scotch pine, a cardinal
starts singing: seven compound metal notes
equal in beat, then silence, then
again the identical seven. Between
the sighs the cars and pick-ups make,
relenting for the curve with a little
gasp of gears, we hear over the road
among the faintly flesh pink
limbs and glow of the apple orchard
a solitary dove throating three sweet
mournful Om, then falling silent, then
—our life together hesitating in this gap
of silence, slipping from us and becoming
nothing we know in the swirl that has
no past, no future, nothing
but the pure pulse-shroud of light, the dread
here-now—reporting thrice again
its own silence. The cup of tea
still steams between your hands
like some warm offering or other
to the nameless radiant vacancy at the window,
this stillness in which we go on happening.
Poems copyright (c) 2018 by Eamon Grennan
Work for CT Poets Corner is selected by invitation.
